Maybe they knew I was here.

The bigger of the two, the one with the mark that cut downward to his thigh, carried a steel jack handle. At one end, in the usual style, was a sharpened human femur that had been lashed, somehow, to the bar. And they were both old, mature, covered in spikes and purple splotches. The smaller one had horns growing out of his nipples, curving upward, and he kept licking at them, nipping, showing his black teeth.

He carried what looked like the head of a three-tined garden cultivator, and was completely naked. Maybe the scalp loincloth fashion I’d seen previously in Marbury hadn’t caught on here. Or maybe he was hunting for his first kill. The larger one had a pair of dried and purple human hands, fingers twisted together, overlapped and woven, cupped around his balls, braided onto a belt made from a Christmas tree light cord that had been strung on either side of his crotch through the dangling headless torsos of Barbie dolls.

It was Marbury, but it was different, too.

It was Marbury magnified, intensified.

We didn’t mean for this to happen.

The Hunters sniffed the air, widening their nostrils. They moved steadily through the dark sea that covered this new world.

But the sheets of rain fell so constantly I was certain they couldn’t possibly see me, as I watched them through the jagged mouth of the door’s shattered window. And still, they kept coming toward the house, sloshing, swinging their heads from side to side, huffing and hissing to sniff for meat.

And I was standing there, barefoot.

I needed to get my shoes on.

I took a deep breath, slipped away from my doorpost back down the hallway toward the bedroom.

And I left a wet trail of blood with each footstep. I saw how it tracked my path behind me, so I opened the door onto the bathroom to let more light into the hallway.

Something was wrong with me.

One of those black slugs I’d seen had attached itself to the top of my foot. Sickened, I watched as it pulsed like an external heart, sucking my blood. Slender and slick with oily skin, uncoiled, it may have been two feet long. Then it detached and began worming its way higher, pulsing its head up the bend in my ankle.

I’d seen leeches before, but this was something else. It moved fast. It made a mess of me.

I slipped the edge of my knife beneath it and pried it away.

It made a squeak, like a crushed bird, and I flicked the thing onto the floor and sliced it in half. It popped like an overripe blueberry, spraying blood—my blood—exploding outward in an awful red chrysanthemum. The thing wriggled and fought before finally relaxing in death.

If I’d had anything at all inside me, I would have vomited. My stomach twisted and crawled upward toward my throat. I pulled my pant legs up and looked for more of the things.

Maybe I got lucky. Maybe not.

I’d have to watch that rainwater, I thought.

I went inside the bedroom, sat down, and started to put my shoes on. Before I did, I pulled the legs of my jeans up past my knees again, just to make sure that was the only one of those leech things I had to deal with.

The safest place to wait, I reasoned, would be in the hallway. I didn’t think the Hunters could get inside the house behind me, and in the other rooms I might be visible from the outside through any one of the broken-out windows.

I squeezed the handle of the knife so tightly my hand began bleeding again. I waited in the middle of the hallway, leaning against one wall to make myself less visible. I felt like I was going to faint from the adrenaline rush, my heart pounding as loud as the rain.

Maybe this would be it, I thought.

Maybe Jack’s universe would just end here in this broken-down house.

Maybe dying would be just like another trip through a lens, anyway.

Fuck this place.

*   *   *

Of course they knew where I was.

I saw the widening gray swath of light as the front door pushed carefully open. The rain got louder. Then there was nothing, but I could visualize what they were doing: sniffing, smelling me, listening, waiting.

When a shadow darkened the entryway, I leapt out from my hiding spot in the hall, hoping to surprise whichever one came through the door first. It was the big one. And when he caught his first glimpse of me coming from the darkness of the hall, he cocked the pickax back in both hands like he was getting ready to swing a baseball bat. But before he could hit me, I buried the knife up to my fist, straight into his armpit.

He wailed, swung.

I saw a flash of movement behind him, the other one, hesitating, pushing his way into the house.

The weapon arced over my head. It buried its point up to the jack handle in the damp wallboard of the hallway. The knife slipped in my grip as I tried to pull it free, twisting and turning, the gristle and bone tearing at its edge. There was so much blood, but I managed to keep hold on the knife as the big Hunter fell back, clawing at his side, releasing his weapon. I pushed him on top of his partner, and felt him twitch and gurgle when he fell onto the gig in the other one’s clawed hand. The big Hunter collapsed between us, dying, wheezing, splashing in the rainwater and gore.

The smaller one ran out of the doorway.

I went after him.

As soon as I stepped past the open door, I was ankle deep in water. My mind flashed on the image of those black leeches, but I forced myself to keep my eyes up.

The Hunter was nowhere in sight.

I slogged around to the corner of the house, waited, breathed, before cautiously stepping around the side.

This had to be a trick or something, I thought. There was no way he could move that fast.

And just when I turned back toward the door, he was on me, leaping down from the edge of the upper floor. Before I could manage to move, I was completely underwater.

I thought I would drown. I was sure of it, and it struck me how I didn’t care. But I watched in a sick kind of fascination, interested in how I could see the wavy image of the Hunter pinning me down above the surface.

Next thing I knew, everything was red, and his grip slackened.

For a second I almost believed I had gone through the lens—ended up somewhere else again. I half expected to hear the ghost, Seth, making his calling taps to me. But then I realized I was still underwater and clutching my knife. I pushed myself up, gagging and spitting, and got to my feet.

The thing that had pinned me down was choking, coughing blood from his nostrils, madly pulling at a slender steel spike that speared cleanly through his neck. But there was a barbed point on the spear’s tip, and the more the Hunter tried pulling the projectile out of his throat, the worse his injury became. And I could see the frantic spray of blood with each beat of his heart, until he finally gave up and sat down and put his face down into the black lake I was standing in.

I looked up into the eyes of a freckle-faced redhead boy who was standing in the middle of a green fiberglass canoe, holding on to something that looked like an oversized red plastic squirt gun. He was smiling, shaking his head at me, cursing, “Good God damn, you’re all kinds of stupid, Odd. You better get the hell out of the water before one of them suckers gets up inside your rig.”

That was the first time I ever saw the kid.

three

I looked at the kid for a second, holding my knife point angled toward him while the rain came in relentless blurring waves between us. And he stood there with that relaxed expression on his face, one foot up on the gunwale of his stupid boat, just rocking, watching to see what I’d do.

I put the knife away. Then I pulled the dead one out through the doorway by his feet.

“Shit on a sidewalk,” the kid said. “Did you kill that one all by yourself?”